As I move through middle age, I find one of the things I value most is focus. My family and I lead active lives. Not busy in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses way, but busy in an engaged embracing-life sort of way. My wife and I work full-time and our kids complement school with a host of after … Read more
My work MacBook Pro needed to go back to the mothership for repairs, so I’m working with a loaner Mac for the next week or two. It’s a minor inconvenience, but it does remind me what my essential apps for the Mac. Here’s the big list of apps I installed on the loaner this week … Read more
At this point, extra storage for game consoles may be almost as critical on Christmas morning as fully charged AA batteries. With modern games taking up a ridiculous amount of space on your typical console it’s all too easy to fill up a 500 GB hard drive … and not realize it until Santa’s already deposited … Read more
Earlier in the summer Evernote limited their free service to only allow syncing between two devices. This severely hampered my Home Mac/Work Mac/iPad/iPhone workflow, and led me to try some other services: Google Keep and SimpleNote. I don’t begrudge Evernote their decision; I was the sort of user who was costing them money without providing … Read more
My family’s big Christmas present this year was an Xbox One. The kids and I are loving it — I’m battling my way through the Halo: Master Chiefedition, and the kids are questing for the Lonely Mountain in LEGO: The Hobbit. Unfortunately while Halo looks great and the voice controls are very 21st century, the damn thing unexpectedly turns … Read more
About a year ago I became a Markdown convert. It’s a simple markup language that’s meant to make web documents readable and scannable. It’s plaintext with a few niceties added in, and I’ve been using it to write most of my work notes and Nuketown articles since Fall 2014.
After 11 days of writing, and a ridiculously long and difficulty week, I was sorely tempted to make a blog post that was nothing but geeky lorem ipsum text.
And then I thought … hey, I could do a blog post about lorem ipsum text. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, lorem ipsum is Latin text used by designers, web developers, and others when they want people to focus on the layout of a page rather than on the contents of the page.
When it comes to operating systems, I’m not an early adopter. Part of this is work — our support for the most recent Mac operating system tends to lag a few months behind the official release as we wait for software and network partners to replace upgrades that run with the OS. I’m also gun … Read more
Nuketown now has a Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/nuketownsf. The goal of this page is two-fold: promote Nuketown, and figure out how to use Facebook pages. As I discussed previously, although I’ve been using social media for years and have 975 followers on my NukeHavoc account, Nuketown was sadly unrepresented.
This created problems with my day job as the goal becomes marketing the college via social media, rather than networking as an individual. I don’t have a lot of experience with tracking social media analytics or setting up a write-once, publish-multiple times mechanic. Getting this setup — first one Twitter, now on Facebook — is an essential part of the redesign.
It’s amazing what a little free time can do. Back in Autumn 2011 I worked hard to come up with wireframes, design comps, and an HTML build out of the new Nuketown. It was built on HTML5 and CSS3 and it was all going swimmingly … until I looked at it in Internet Explorer 9.
The entire design fell apart. IE9, which I thought had better standards support than its predecessors, simply didn’t understand HTML5 elements like “nav” or “figure”. It refused to style them, and without the formatting, the design collapsed. About the same time work got nuts, and most of my free time was devoured by work projects. I probably could have pressed ahead with Nuketown, but truth be told I just didn’t have the energy to fight the good fight.
Flashforward a few months. My big projects are complete, and I finally found some time to figure out what the hell was going so wrong with IE9. An hour of searching and experimentation revealed the answer: IE9 mode.
You see, Internet Explorer has a long history of “modes” — ways of operating that supported (or broke) certain standards. It was quirky to say the least, and I’d forgotten about it. By default, Internet Explorer 9 operates in compatibility mode, which apparently means it tries to display everything as a sucky old browser would, while choking on the latest HTML5 standards.